Sponsors page improvements

[yochem]

Problem

• The sponsors page is currently the only content page that is not in markdown but html.
• Sponsors are listed on both the homepage and on the sponsors page, but there is no overlap. This makes it unclear which sponsors are still currently sponsoring Nvim
  • Homepage: SerpApi, greptile, CodeRabbit
  • Sponsors page: Meta, Rizin, Route4Me, Original fundraisers: DigitalOcean, SuperJer, Bountysource, Ryan Durk
• Need manual updating when term ends

Solution

• Convert /sponsors/ to markdown
• Create a data/sponsors.yml file to track sponsors
  • Can still differentiate in which pages (homepage or sponsor page) to target
  • Can include an end-date which excludes the sponsor from the website during build time

Questions

• What's the idea with the two locations? Do we want /sponsors/ to include all sponsors, and highlight some on the homepage?

[justinmk]

What's the idea with the two locations?

main page is the more expensive "tier".

Create a data/sponsors.yml

ideally would like to avoid disconnected files, keep data in the page itself

[yochem]

ideally would like to avoid disconnected files, keep data in the page itself

I understand what you mean, but isn't the sponsors data different from the textual content of /sponsors/? I think it's fine to disconnect the textual content on that page from the sponsors listing. Even more because the "sponsors listing" data (which seems like a better fitting group to me) is spread over two pages.

[justinmk]

if I need to update the sponsors I would prefer to just go to the right page.

if there is a technical reason why it shouldn't be like that, no strong objection :)

[yochem]

Well the goal of this issue is to merely improve maintainability (for you, mostly). If you deem it to be less maintainable than the current situation I'll drop the suggestion :)

It seems to me something like this is much more maintainable:

sponsors:
  - image: images/sponsors/cool-sponsor.png
    name: CoolSponsor
    page: home # or tier: X or something else
    start_date: 2026-05-05
    end_date: 2026-08-05
  - image: ...

[justinmk]

thank you 🤗 the start_date/end_date sure looks nice...

[justinmk]

Randomizing the order of the sponsors would also be helpful, so that each sponsor gets exposure "avoid the fold".

[yochem]

we could do that either user-side with some JS or during build using math.Rand in Hugo. Since the build runs daily, that would mean a daily shuffle. What would you prefer?

[justinmk]

Interesting. I guess since the daily build isn't tracked in any git branch that we care about, that is probably fine!